Geothermal study no.1

This photographic print comes from a negative that Theo Schoon made in the early 1950s. It is one of thousands of photographs that Schoon took of the geothermal region around Rotorua. From boiling mud pools to more dormant pools of water and mud like this one, Schoon was fascinated by the variety of nature. He spent over a year photographing geothermal subjects.

A weekend photographer
In 1950 Schoon left Auckland and spent some time travelling around the central North Island. He eventually settled in Rotorua, and began working at the Waipa sawmill as a 'glue man', laminating panels of wood together. In the weekends he would take his tent and camp out among his subjects, spending entire days photographing the changing effects of light and water on mud pools and other geothermal activity.

Up close and personal
Schoon's black and white photographs of geothermal activity are characterised by a close-up view, in which the camera's perspective provides new insight into the subject. Familiar sights like a serrated edge of a mud pool become strange, and unseen patterns of nature are revealed to the viewer. The key to Schoon's photographs is his use of light. As Geothermal Study no.1 demonstrates, he often captures light glinting off mud and water and this makes his studies seem alive.

An alternative view
The alternative perspective of well-known geothermal phenomena that Schoon achieved in photographs such as Geothermal Study no.1 is what pleased him the most. In a letter dated September 1967 he wrote: 'In Rotorua, I watch the tourists with much amusement. They all stop at the same spot to take their pictures, and the miracles a few feet away from them remain unobserved, because they are under the spell of the "spectaculars" which everybody sees and takes.' Schoon's vision of Rotorua remains unusual, and was a major achievement in modernist photography in New Zealand.